It is that time of year again — when German holidaymakers head straight from the beach to the courtroom seeking compensation for what they believe to have been a rotten summer.

For the last two months, judging by the complaints pouring into court, they have been inhabiting a Fawlty Towers world of dead mice under hotel beds, cockroaches in the bath and lovesick dogs that howl all night.

Breakfast milk tasted like onions, spaghetti was served up at a gala dinner, hair turned green in the swimming pool and a concrete mixer started to churn after dawn. That was just the four-star establishments.

About 1.5 million Germans a year register complaints with their travel companies, and about 30,000 end up in court. “It's not so much a question of getting money back,” says Bernd Haas, a teacher whose children were bitten this summer by big fat flies in the Dominican Republic, “it's about justice”. He does, however, want some cash back too, and will be lodging a claim next week.

With careful planning, an unhappy tourist can expect to be repaid a fair chunk of his holiday costs. “Everything that has been described in the catalogue becomes part of a contract as soon as the holiday is confirmed,” says Brigitte Sievering-Wichers, of the consumer protection office in Baden-Württemberg. “That means if air conditioning has been promised and you don't have it, you can expect to be repaid.”

The rate is between 10 and 20 per cent of hotel costs for every day that the air conditioning fails to work, according to the Landesgericht Frankfurt, the court that processes most complaints. It has drawn up a rule-of-thumb index for compensation — based on rulings in 20,000 past cases — but a spokesman said that each case had to be judged on its merits.

The prudent traveller makes a list of the problems on the spot, complete with date and times, calls in witnesses from neighbouring rooms, sets a deadline for improvement and then hands it to the company representative. “What is important is to gather proof of defects, preferably by taking photos or using a videocam,” says Beate Wagner, a travel law expert for the North Rhine Westphalia consumer association.

Other countries have a chuckle over holiday snaps. In Germany they are hard evidence, collected with the kind of rigour more usual at a crime scene.

The courts, irritated by frivolous complaints, are getting tougher with moaning holiday survivors. A decade ago the Frankfurt regional court ruled that travellers could “claim a 100 per cent rebate if ten cockroaches can be found within a square metre of his or her hotel room”.

But times have changed. Three cockroaches in a bath in Cuba was regarded as “unpleasant but acceptable” in a recent court decision.

The Germans, in other words, should be less fussy. Departure delays of under four hours should be accepted; so should yapping dogs, noisy children, roosters at dawn, up to three geckos in a room in the Caribbean and badly fried schnitzels in Thailand.

The rush to the courts has ensured that German tourist brochures are now among the most honest in the world, with sea-views and the angles of hotel balconies described with geometrical precision. Thanks to German grumbling, standards have improved beyond recognition in Spain, Portugal and the Red Sea coast.

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